Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1906

Voted for Musil's angsty slice of yaoi. Quite a year for gay fiction it seems, with Wings and Imre in there as well.

I own Soseki's Botchan and the Shimazaki, should really get around to reading them.

A good year, and I’ll come back and write more about my favourites later, but I voted for The Railway Children.

I remember liking both of the Soseki books listed here but read them a long time ago.

That + Musil means I've read three books listed for the first time. Going for Musil though, again, I should give it another once over.

so Baum was writing non-oz books alongside the oz books? (and those oz books aren't short - i thought it'd be fun to read them all but had imagined them to be like 100 pages each)

the other surprise is that Soseki is a C19 author - i had them pegged as much later

I had to remove some Baum books to keep the list to 50! Dude must have had some gambling debts.

Also removed Soseki's I Am A Cat because a) not very good and b) very clearly columns stitched together into a novel

Not read a lot from this year (Hamsun, E. Nesbit, Soseki) but they're all really great. Soseki gets my vote, easily, a beautiful poetic meditation.

How's Hesse's 'Beneath the Wheel'?

The Molnar and Wodehouse are funny but early works. Botchan or Torless or Wings or Railway Children is a hard choice.

Wow, E. Nesbit is running against herself here. I had to vote Story of the Amulet because it's so brilliant (first children's time-travel book ever!) and I love it despite the awful anti-semitic chapter.

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The Jungle was the most influential

The Jungle was the most influential

― Et Dieu crea l' (Michael White), Sunday, September 20, 2020 7:16 AM (seven hours ago)

I agree, but also I was wondering -- whether non-US ilxors share this opinion?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Depends on the terms I guess sarahell. In terms of popularity/belovedness I think Railway Children is bigger in Europe - or the UK, at least; in terms of critical respect I think the Musil might have it? One thing's for sure though, when Sinclair gets mentioned here it's always because of his real life influence.

Forgot to actually vote for Kusamakura it seems. Oh well.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1907

I would argue that Story of the Amulet, as the book that invented children's time-travel literature, is pretty influential as well. I may be wrong, but I think it's also the first book of any kind where people travel in time by magic as opposed to inventing a time machine? So it really creates a whole genre of time-travel fantasy that extends beyond children's lit, all the way to something like Kindred.

I think A Conneticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court did that first?

Oh, you're right! I had a feeling I was forgetting something.